J&J Ordered to Pay Nearly $500M in Hip Implant Trial

Thursday, March 24, 2016 | 0

A federal jury in Dallas last week ordered Johnson & Johnson and its DePuy unit to pay $497.6 million to five plaintiffs who said they were injured by Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implants.

Following a two-month trial and a week of deliberation, jurors found that the design of the Pinnacle hips was flawed and that the companies didn't warn the public about their risks, Reuters reported.

The jury’s award included $360 million in punitive damages, according to the Lanier Law Firm, whose attorney Mark Lanier was part of the team representing plaintiffs in the case.

Johnson and Johnson, which has said that it researched and marketed the devices responsibly, told Reuters that it will appeal.

The trial was the second involving the Pinnacle device. In an earlier trial, in 2014, Johnson & Johnson was cleared of liability.

More than 8,000 lawsuits regarding the Pinnacle implants have been consolidated in Texas federal court.

DePuy stopped selling the metal-on-metal version of the Pinnacle implants in 2013. That year, it paid $2.5 billion to settle more than 7,000 lawsuits over a separate metal-on-metal hip device, the ASR, which was recalled in 2010, according to Reuters.